Starting March 2nd, Kingsborough Community College (KCC) of the City University of New York (CUNY) will be hosting Spring 2018 CUNY-wide Metagenomics Discovery Challenge (MDC CUNY). MDC CUNY – it’s a certificate-based  course. The independent study course is offered in a hybrid format and it will be using the Team-Based Learning  (TBL) pedagogy and Open Educational Resources (OER).  It doesn’t have any prerequisites, but a background in biological sciences or computer science would be helpful.  Students will learn to do bio-surveillance on public metagenomic datasets*, identifying fungal (and other micro-eukaryotic), bacterial, archaeal and viral sequences within these datasets.  This will reinforce the fundamentals of computational biology utilizing the Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology utilizing computational tools important in determining metagenomics data sets.  At the end of the semester, students will create a 3-5 minute video using the available  resources to explain the tools they’ve learned, the importance of viral discovery and antibiotic resistance, and their discoveries. A committee of judges will select the best presentation and that team of students will win $5,000.00 that can be applied towards a CUNY semester’s tuition. The funding for this award comes from a gift to  CUNY, by Deloitte Consulting LLP, which is seeking to promote students entering the Biotechnology workforce after graduation. In addition to Deloitte, CUNY is partnering with the San Diego State University (SDSU) in San Diego and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to design and teach the course’s curriculum.  Additional funding for this course comes from NSF XSEDEs JetStream .